Who Should I Believe?

[Jesus surprised at America’s attempt to grow a soul.]

A mean person sent me this on purpose to irritate me and ruin my comfortable scroll through what I should be wearing this fall (white blouses, patterned trousers, ankle boots, in case you were wondering). It’s a picture of a piece of paper and you have to click on it and try to read it as best you can. At the top it says “The Way,” and then under that “A Litany of Confession and Witness: Believing Women.”

It begins with Eve and basically goes through Hannah, Tamar, Mary and on to Anita Hill and Dr. Blasey Ford—the litanist saying what the woman said, and the congregation responding with who it was that believed her. Truly, do click on the link and read through it so that I don’t have to go line by line.

So anyway, I’ve been trying to put my finger on what’s wrong with this particular moment, and I think I’ve discovered it. You are free to disagree with me because this is only a cobbled together hypothesis, but I’m sure I must be on to something. The current political moment is a—as in not—moral. Not immoral necessarily, and certainly not moral, but amoral—not defined by morality one way or the other. And therefore, it is very hard to think theologically, though that is what we all need to try to do.

To say it another way, what is going on in the political sphere is not Christian—and I mean that descriptively, not judgmentally. The #metoo movement rose up and took off in the secular world. One day we all woke up and women were able to say that powerful men had done unspeakable things to them, and for the first time in, well, biblical ages, those men lost their jobs. It was extraordinary. And continues on being unparalleled in human history. This movement, as it should be, is now even in the church. Powerful well-known pastors who many thought unimpeachable turned out to be mortal, sinful, bad, and then without jobs. And certainly this has been morally good. When you have hurt and violated someone, for justice to be done in a human context, that is a moral good.

But the movement itself is secular, and as it rolls along day by day, it continues to be a secular, and now political movement that isn’t necessarily bound by the confines of moral thinking. It can’t be because Americans haven’t been thinking and acting morally for quite some time now. When Brett Kavanaugh was drinking and footballing his way through the 80s and Dr. Ford was a young person hanging about at various parties, not a soul was thinking about the morality of it all. Watch any movie from the 80s, as I have been doing for the last decade trying to catch up, and you don’t toddle off to bed musing deeply on goodness, truth, beauty, justice, and certainly not God. You have just watched two hours of carousing and sex with weird grainy camera angles. To try to read any moral sense backwards to that period feels vaguely anachronistic, like being shocked about sexism in the Middle Ages. Really? For more than half a century, Americans believed with their whole hearts, souls, and minds that sex was free and consequence-less, especially if you could get rid of the baby.

So anyway, the trouble is, the twitter-verse is now all chattering along as if morality is suddenly a thing. And I think that’s where we Christians fall prey to confusion. The person who is praying The Way litany about believing women doesn’t really want to know the full picture of what God thinks about human sexuality. The people organizing our politics do not give a fig about what is truly just and right. The NYT does not really care about the weak and the oppressed. But all those people are using the language of right and wrong, as if they woke up yesterday and grew a moral soul, and we all believe them. Color me bemused. No they didn’t.

This being so, Christians have a perfect opportunity to rush out into this dystopic ruined sexual landscape to tell people the gospel in clear and simple language.

That gospel doesn’t include God “believing” us. We are basically wrong, having all—man and woman—offended him. We all have to be saved by believing him, rather than ourselves. That said, he is on the side of the weak, the downcast, the oppressed, the one has has been left by the side of the road as for dead. He, in his great mercy, comes and picks that one up (which is you when you are dead in sin) and pays for you to be made well out of his own self. And so of course we Christians should be looking for that one, lifting that one up, helping, listening, casting abroad the very same mercy that is the foundation of our very lives.

And I do think we should try being clear in our own moral and theological thinking. Sex is for marriage between one man and one woman, and even then it should not be coercive and abusive. It is the free gift of one human person to another human person, within the boundaries that God gave out of his goodness. Our trouble as humans is that we fundamentally don’t believe God—that he is good, holy, just, and merciful, not capricious and bad. Moreover, he, not a political process, not a politician, is our hope and our Savior. If you have to believe anyone, believe him.